First Sunday in Advent – November 29, 2009

Jeremiah 33:¹⁴ “‘The days are coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when I will fulfill the gracious promise I made to the house of Israel and to the house of Judah. ¹⁵“‘In those days and at that time I will make a righteous Branch sprout from David’s line; he will do what is just and right in the land. ¹⁶ In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. This is the name by which it will be called: The Lord Our Righteousness.’

One of the truths we learn from Holy Scriptures is that when God makes a promise, that promise will be kept. Joshua told the children of Israel, “Not one of all the Lord’s good promises to the house of Israel failed; every one was fulfilled” (Joshua 21:45). Unlike sinful, fickle human beings, God remains faithful to his promises.

There can be no greater evidence of that fact than in the wonderful promise of God to send a Savior. God made that promise to Adam and Eve in the garden, repeated that promise down through the ages and fulfilled that promise in the person of Jesus Christ, who came into the world to suffer and die for our sins. Though God’s people were unfaithful to him time and again, God was faithful to his people and his promise.

There is a wealth of comfort in this for us as children of God. For God has given us some marvelous promises through his Word. He promises forgiveness of sins through the blood of Jesus shed on the cross. He promises eternal life in heaven to all who trust in Jesus as Savior. He promises that he won’t leave us or forsake us as we travel here below. Storms may gather in our lives. Times of trouble and depression may come and cast shadows of doubt in our minds about our forgiveness or our salvation or the nearness of God. At times like these, and at all times, we remember these words: “The days are coming…when I will fulfill the gracious promise I made,” and know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that with God, no promise is too good to be true.

Let’s begin here by talking a little about Jeremiah. Most of the prophet Jeremiah’s life was spent ministering in a country whose doom was sealed – and they knew it. If you were to turn back a chapter, you would find Jeremiah sitting in jail. You see, as a faithful prophet, he had passed along a message from God to King Zedekiah – a message the king didn’t like. And we can see why when we see the negative message Jeremiah was commanded to proclaim: Zedekiah, you are a loser. The war you are waging is futile. You will not succeed. Jerusalem will be destroyed. The inhabitants of Judah will be taken into captivity. You will be captured and hauled off to Babylon. You will not escape.

But the fact that Jeremiah was in jail because he proclaimed a message from God to the king isn’t the amazing part of the story. The amazing part is that while in jail, one of Jeremiah’s cousins came to him with a piece of land to sell. We could easily understand it if Jeremiah had said to his cousin, “Don’t you see what’s happening to Jerusalem? Can’t you see that we are defeated? I’m not about to fork over a bunch of money for a piece of land that is about to be taken by a foreign enemy.” But that isn’t what Jeremiah said because God had told him to buy the land, to have the deed witnessed and notarized and then put away in a safe place. The reason: “As I have brought all this great calamity on this people, so I will give them all the prosperity I have promised them. ⁴³ Once more fields will be bought in this land…because I will restore their fortunes, declares the LORD” (Jeremiah 32:42-44). He was telling Jeremiah, it is because these people have sinned against me that I have brought this calamity down on them. Nevertheless, you can be sure I will also do all the good that I have promised. My people will come back to this land. You can be sure of it because I have promised it.

Then God moved Jeremiah to pen the powerful words that open our text, words that are repeated over a dozen times throughout the book of Jeremiah, “the days are coming, declares the LORD.” Every time Jeremiah speaks those words, he is referring to some promise of God and how God is going to fulfill that promise. It always expresses certainty. In this case, it is the days in which the LORD would bring his people back to Jerusalem. AND, in this case, it is the days in which he would send a Savior who would undo sin’s curse. AND, in this case, it is the days when Jesus will come back on the last day.

“The days are coming.” That phrase is so powerful. There’s no room for doubt. God will keep his promise. It doesn’t matter how impossible it looks. It doesn’t matter that the enemy is knocking down Jerusalem’s front door. It doesn’t matter that the Savior was to come from David’s line, even though never again would a physical king in Jerusalem be from David’s line. “The days are coming.” God promised it. Jeremiah could count on it. And so can we.

“The days are coming.” Those are powerful words for you, too. In fact, isn’t that the reason why this time of year is so powerful for us as Christians? Unlike Jeremiah, we have the privilege of seeing and celebrating the fulfillment of the greatest promise God ever made – “I will make a righteous Branch sprout from David’s line.” That is the promise of the Savior. But have you ever asked, how could God cause a righteous, that is, sinless branch or descendant to sprout from David’s family? If the Bible declares, “Flesh gives birth to flesh” (John 3:6); and if this branch, the Savior, was to be the offspring of the woman, wouldn’t he be human like you and me? Wouldn’t he be sinful from birth, and not holy?

God provides the answer in Luke 1:35, “The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.” The promise required an impossible miracle. The promise required the eternal God to take on human flesh and blood and become both God and man. And Jesus Christ was flesh and blood like you and me. However, he was no ordinary human being; he was the sinless Son of God. Thus he could live a perfect life of obedience to the will of God, which you and I are incapable of because of our sinful nature. He would die for the sins we have committed, so that we might be forgiven. You see, Christmas is the celebration of God keeping this promise he made through Jeremiah. It is evidence that with God no promise is too good to be true.

So, where does that leave you and me? “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). It makes us part of God’s family. God’s promise of forgiveness of sins, life and salvation belong to all who believe in Jesus Christ as their Savior.

“The days are coming.” Those are still powerful words for us. Since God does not break a promise we can be certain that “he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed” (Acts 17:31). Now the question is - Are you prepared? Are you ready?

Prepare for the coming of the Lord! That is the message of Advent. In our gospel lesson this morning, Jesus tells us what that means, “Be careful, or your hearts will be weighed down with dissipation, drunkenness and the anxieties of life, and that day will close on you unexpectedly like a trap…be always on the watch, and pray” (Luke 21:34,36). Paul prayed for the Thessalonians that they would be “blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes” (1 Thessalonians 3:13). Don’t get caught up chasing the things of this world! Don’t let the commercialism and materialism of Christmas blind you to why Christ came! Don’t go on sinning as if you have some right to do what you want! Don’t continue with a lukewarm attitude to the Word, which leads you to excuse yourself from daily time with the Bible, regular, every Sunday worship, and reception of Holy Communion. Instead, meditate, focus, direct your attention to the manger, cross and empty tomb. Learn again and again what it means. Meditate on it throughout the day. Inwardly digest the words of the Lord. Remain steadfast in the faith until finally we are gathered in heaven on the Last Day.

God will keep every promise he has ever made. That is an awesome comfort because we know how awful it would be if God spoke only of the things we deserve. Look at what was happening to God’s Old Testament people. They were about to be torn from their homes, their country, separated from family and friends. Keeping in mind the worship of God’s Old Testament people, imagine the shock of no longer being able to worship at the temple or being able to bring the God-ordained sacrifices for sin.

But this judgment was not coming without reason. Take a look at Jeremiah 32, beginning at verse 17. It’s a prayer Jeremiah spoke. He speaks of the great power of God and how God used that power to accomplish a great deliverance for his people out of slavery in Egypt. But “they did not obey you or follow your law; they did not do what you commanded them to do” (Jeremiah 32:23). Drop down to verse 30, “The people of Israel and Judah have done nothing but evil in my sight from their youth.” Go to verse 33, “…they turned their backs to me and not their faces; though I taught them again and again, they would not listen or respond to discipline. ³⁴ They set up their abominable idols in the house that bears my Name and defiled it. ³⁵ They built high places for Baal in the Valley of Ben Hinnom to sacrifice their sons and daughters to Molech, though I never commanded, nor did it enter my mind, that they should do such a detestable thing.”

As horrible as the sins of God’s Old Testament people may seem to us today, are they really all that different from what we see happening in our own lives? Jesus summarized God’s law in a word – love: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind…and… ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’” (Matthew 22:37,39). The bitterness, anger, impatience and jealousy that all too often rule our hearts, our mouths and our actions; do these flow from the love God commands? Idols by different names – whether they be money, materialism, status or other worldly pleasures – are idols still the same, are they not? Baal was the Old Testament god of sex and illicit pleasures. All too often this detestable god finds his way into our homes and lives today. Sacrificing children? How often do we sacrifice our children as our jobs, worldly pursuits, or simply convenience and less work push God and discipline and spiritual growth to the bottom of our family’s priority list?

What if God spoke promises to us in keeping with our sinful actions? What if we opened the Bible and all we found were phrases like this: “The days are coming when the Lord will give us our just desserts! But that’s exactly why the message of the Bible is so awesome, because the heart and soul of the Bible are God’s promises of rescue to sinners who don’t deserve it.

This whole book of Jeremiah speaks of God’s judgment on his people; judgment that flowed from God’s loving concern for people who had turned their backs to him. Yet, God can’t help but interject again and again his desire and his promise to help and save and rescue his people: “I will never stop doing good to them” (32:40). “I will heal my people and will let them enjoy abundant prosperity” (33:6). And then the beautiful words of our text that speak of the righteous Savior to come and how he will make God’s people righteous once and for all, “This is the name by which it will be called: The Lord Our Righteousness.”

You know, it’s so easy for us to get this “religion” thing all turned around – to begin to think that religion is my attempt to make myself righteous before God. What a crazy idea! The Bible is not about what man does for God, but what God does for man. The Bible is not about man attempting to overcome his sinful nature on his own, but God giving a new nature to his people through the power of Word and Sacrament. The Bible is not about man putting on their best robe of righteousness, but about God giving us the righteous robe of Christ. Christ’s perfect robe of righteousness purchased with his blood is handed down to us through faith. By his life of perfect obedience and by his bitter sufferings and death, Jesus has obtained a robe of righteousness with which we will be covered as we stand before God on Judgment Day.

This season of advent is about God fulfilling all his promises. So we wait for Jesus to come again, to rescue us from the grief and misery that are a part of living in this world of sin. The days are coming, my friends, as impossible as it may seem, when we will live in complete safety, when we will live in the city called “the Lord our righteousness.” The days are coming; we can count on it – because with God, no promise is too good to be true. Amen.